1217 Drop Off The Altar?

September 10th, Monday…

Yan Qi sat down at his desk, still yawning.

He had spent some time this weekend and finally finished writing all the updates for Eternal Reincarnation.

According to the current information he had, the entire game process of Eternal Reincarnation was highly overlapping with Repent and be Saved. The overall scene was basically the same. However, the appearance of the monster, skills, the style of the scene, and the route had changed.

The entire scene process for Repent and be Saved could basically be divided into initial villages, malicious spirit towns, gateways, Road to the Underworld, River of Forgetfulness (Bridge of Forgetfulness), Home-Viewing Pavilion (Three-Life Stone), Yama's palace, six realms of rebirth and existence hell, and a few scenes that had been updated before Eternal Reincarnation.

Eternal Reincarnation was a game that started directly from the Road to the Underworld. The first part of the content was updated to the Bridge of Forgetfulness.

The end of the Bridge of Helplessness was still used as the scene of the Boss battle. However, after defeating Boss Granny Meng, they could not continue advancing. The white fog door behind Granny Meng was not opened even though the teleportation point had been activated. Obviously, they had to wait until the next update.

This new version of Granny Meng made Yan Qi suffer a lot.

The changes to the Boss were similar to other small monsters: compared to the original version, the new version of Granny Meng was no longer in a crazy state. Her attacking desire had decreased. She maintained her rationality according to the settings. However, its AI seemed to have been adjusted higher. The combo attack and immediate death throwing skill were more threatening.

Yan Qi's feeling was that the current combat experience of Eternal Reincarnation was very difficult. However, the fun did not improve. Instead, it decreased.

He could not tell if it was because the system design this time was not done well which caused the Martial God to hurt a little. Or was it because he was actually tired of Repent and be Saved's combat method and this tiredness completely exploded in Eternal Reincarnation.

After all, Eternal Reincarnation was replicating the game scenes in Repent and be Saved.

If they changed to a new game setting and a new monster, they would still be able to obtain a new combat experience even if they replicated the previous combat system.

However, even though the appearance of the monsters had changed, they still gave people the feeling that they were playing a second round. This was relatively boring for many old players.

Yan Qi's thinking was obviously not an exception. This weekend, gamers online had also launched an intense debate about Eternal Reincarnation. They were arguing non-stop.

Conflicts between veteran gamers and ordinary players instantly erupted.

In fact, when Repent and be Saved was first released, this conflict had already begun.

Veteran gamers had to pursue higher difficulties. They hoped that their superb skills could be distinguished from ordinary gamers. Thus, the more difficult the game was, the better. The fewer people who cleared the game, the better. The more challenging it was, the more their skills would be highlighted.

On the other hand, ordinary players did not have that kind of patience. They only wanted to obtain limited challenges while maintaining the game ability. Once the difficulty of the challenge was too high, they would lose their patience and become frustrated.

Thus, this situation often happened: ordinary players felt that the difficulty was too high and complained online. Veteran gamers mocked that the game was not meant for lousy players. Both sides began to argue.

They had already argued once when Repent and be Saved was released. However, that argument was resolved by Teacher Qiao's video.

"Players with terrible skills would be able to understand the true meaning of the game better. That's because struggling in the bitterness would allow them to become one with the protagonist.

This sentence gave ordinary gamers a reason to continue playing. That was why Repent and be Saved could fulfill the demands of both gamers and become a classic.

However, Eternal Reincarnation seemed to be unable to use this reason to avoid it.

That was because the difficulty level of Eternal Reincarnation had actually exceeded the threshold of ordinary players. They did not have the patience to experience the so-called true meaning of the game.

Thus, ordinary gamers who complained about the game's design problems began to debate with core gamers who could not wait for the game to be more difficult.

Ordinary players thought that the game was meant to serve the masses. If most people could not derive joy from it, it would undoubtedly be a failed game. Repent and be Saved's previous success was because it balanced the relationship between difficulty and pleasure. Eternal Reincarnation did not do this well.

On the other hand, veteran gamers thought that Repent and be Saved was a difficult action game to begin with. Under the premise that the main body had already taken care of ordinary gamers, it was understandable for the downloadable content to increase the difficulty and give gamers a higher challenge. They could choose not to play with their lousy hands and glass hearts.

Both types of players fought until their faces turned red.

On top of that, there were other gamers studying the special block mechanism.

Many players had realized that a special block mechanism would indeed be triggered in the game. There was a very small chance of activating it only after using only the demon sword and dying many times.

After triggering it, there would be a certain amount of damage reduction effect, but it could not completely prevent injury. That was because the monsters in the game had extremely high damage, so the meaning of this reduction was negligible.

However, this automatic block mechanism would change as the game progressed: the chances of blockage would be more frequent and the block immunity effect would gradually increase.

However, since there was no complete process at the moment, it was still unknown what it would look like at the highest stage.

Thus, gamers began to guess if the block mechanism was related to the new combat system.

At that moment, the updated content of Eternal Reincarnation caused a huge controversy. It obtained a lot of discussion and attention online.

Yan Qi sat at his work desk. He read the work reports and work plans submitted by the various departments as he ate his melon on the internet.

"Tengda is really a company that is constantly popular. It can actually do something like updating downloadable content so shockingly."

"I've lived long enough to see this."

"You can always jump back and forth at the brink of death. The key is that in less than the last second, you will never be able to tell if it is really courting death or playing performance art for everyone."

"Forget it, I'll be logical."

"It's just a downloadable content. It's not enough to make Tengda fall off the pedestal."

Logically speaking, the downloadable content would not be scolded as long as the price was not too outrageous and it was not too badly done.

However, the current situation of Eternal Reincarnation was obviously different from ordinary downloadable content.

Recently, there have been many comments about 'Tengda has fallen off the pedestal' on the internet. This meant that the update of Eternal Reincarnation had not managed to please enough players of Repent and be Saved.

Some people were leading the way, while others were really disappointed in the downloadable content.

However, no matter what, this was just cheap downloadable content. Yan Qi felt that it was still too early to say that it had fallen off the pedestal.

Yan Qi, who had already seen many of Tengda's tricks, felt that it was better to wait for the entire downloadable content to be updated and analyze it seriously before coming to a conclusion.

At that moment, Yan Qi saw a new announcement on Dawn Games platform.

"Eh? A game judge?"

When he first saw the announcement, Yan Qi did not think too much about it.

After all, the concept of 'critic' existed on many gaming platforms and even film review websites. It was not rare.

The so-called 'judges' were nothing more than giving high-quality users certain rights so that they could become leaders of opinion. To a certain extent, it would affect other users' first impression of a game and a movie.

Their job was to write reviews and enrich the content on the platform.

As a platform where players had a lot of autonomy and could even take down games, it was perfectly normal for the exposed gaming platform to launch this tasting system.

At first, Yan Qi thought that this was normal. However, after carefully reading the contents of the announcement, he was shocked.

That was because Dawn Games platform's critics were completely different from other platforms' critics!

…

The announcement clearly stated the details of the entire system.

First was the number of evaluators: one in ten thousand of the active players on the entire platform.

If he could earn five hundred thousand yuan a month, he would have fifty critics; if he could earn two million yuan a month, he would have two hundred critics.

In the future, as the scale of Dawn Games platform expanded, the number of active players would increase. Naturally, the number of reviewers would increase.

Different game types would be distributed based on the number of players.

There would be more critics for popular games and fewer critics for niche games, but there would not be a situation where there were no critics for unpopular games.

The second was the evaluation method of the critics: There were three main criteria: the length of the game, the number of trophies, the number of praises for the game.

In other words, the more games there were, the longer the period, the more achievements and trophies they would obtain, and the wider the influence of the game evaluation that they would write. That would make it easier for them to win the critics' election.

A key point to note was when selecting good critics, they were particular about 'specializations in the industry' or 'professional competitions'.

For example, a critic who was good at action games could only play in the field of action games. He could not extend his hand to other unfamiliar fields.

Of course, he could not rule out the possibility that some players would specialize in multiple fields at the same time. As long as their data reached the standard in the corresponding fields, there would be no problem.

Then it was the job of a critic: write a game review and decide on the game's recommendation spot.

There was no need to say much about the game review. In fact, there was no restriction on this. Every player on the platform could write it, but the evaluation of the critics would be prioritized.

What's more, Dawn Games platform would also take the initiative to ask these reviewers for manuscripts so that they could play the games that had not been released in advance. If the game reviews they wrote were enthusiastic, they would also receive a certain amount of cash.

The most important thing was the recommendation spot.

Critics could decide on the game recommendation spots that they were good at. The specific mechanism was that critics would vote on the games that they were good at every week. Finally, they would arrange for the best, second best, ordinary, and other recommendation spots based on the number of votes.

If the votes were the same, they would decide on order based on the game's own recommendation rate.

Most of the recommendation spots on the entire platform would be distributed according to the critics' votes. Only a small portion of the recommendation spots would be distributed by the platform. This was mainly to allow some new games to have minimal exposure.